Hizballahstan

Ehud Ya'ari, Jerusalem Report Magazine, 7.6.00

(Bilal Kasmar/AP)

(June 19, 2000) From the ramparts of the castle of Beaufort all the way to the Mediterranean shore, the majority of the territory that was once known as Fatahland, and that later became the Israeli-controlled security zone, has now turned into Hizballahstan.

The bottom line: Israel has, pure and simply, handed over control along the length of its northern border to a party that has declared Holy War against it. If, before the withdrawal, the open-fire regulations for IDF soldiers guarding the border were to shoot any armed, unidentified element on sight, they now have to keep their safety catches firmly closed even as a Hizballah fighter waves his rifle across the fence, less than a hundred yards away from houses on the perimeter of Upper Galilee communities.

Without any exaggeration or resort to poetic license, the IDF is now deployed outside the lounge window of my Aunt Devorah’s house in Metullah; Hizballah sits just across the fence in Kafr Kila, recruiting into its ranks the young Shi’ites who used to help with the cherry-picking in Devorah’s orchards. She spotted a few of them on TV sporting new stubble and the yellow flags of the new lords in the area, saluting Hizballah secretary general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah at the victory rally he held on May 26 in liberated South Lebanon. Some of the new recruits can, by the way, still be reached on their Israeli cell phones, but that won’t be the case for long. For the first time in a quarter century, since the end of 1975, the Good Fence is locked and all traffic across the famous border point has stopped.

This new reality won’t change even if the U.N. realizes all its plans for upgrading UNIFIL from six to eight battalions and deploying them along the electronic wire of the international border line. UNIFIL doesn’t have any real mandate to operate against Hizballah. Rather, its brief is to assist the Lebanese government in enforcing its authority. In any case, only a fool would believe that Italians, French, Danes or Australians, should they ever appear, would put their heart into continuing from the point at which the IDF left off. We have already witnessed how UNIFIL officers from the command headquarters in Naqura were invited to Bint Jbeil to listen to Sheikh Nasrallah make a mockery of the Security Council and explain that he has no interest in its resolutions. Naturally, it didn’t occur to them to get up and leave as the crowd of thousands bellowed out an oath of allegiance to Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Sure, it would be nice if the Foreign Legionnaires were to come in place of the UNIFIL soldiers from Fiji or Ghana, or in addition to them, but it won’t make a huge difference. Lebanon is no Sierra Leone, but the Blue Helmets aren’t likely to clash with the turbans.

The hope in the corridors of the U.N. and in Jerusalem, that regular troops of the Lebanese Army will be sent south, also remains a distant one. According to the assessments, a deployment on a scale of two to three brigades could rein in Hizballah’s control over the territory and could only aid stability. But all that Syria had allowed Lebanese President Emile Lahoud to do by press time was to send down a few hundred gendarmes to protect the Christian villages that had been the target of raids and looting. The Lebanese gendarmes in their mottled uniforms, submachine guns at the ready, make for good photographs, but nobody in Lebanon takes them seriously. They represent nothing more than a means for the puppet government in Beirut to display nominal sovereignty without impinging on the de facto control seized by Hizballah in the first 48 hours after the Israeli evacuation.

Syria managed to create a vacuum in South Lebanon that, predictably, has been filled by Hizballah. True, Nasrallah conceded power in the Druse sector in the southeast to the militias of Walid Jumblatt and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party. Hizballah also tolerates an Amal armed presence in the Shi’ite areas. But overall superiority belongs decidedly, unequivocally, to Hizballah.

For our part, the Lebanese State is only our theoretical neighbor. Our actual, immediate neighbors belong to a movement created by Iran, that is totally mobilized by and loyal to Iran’s political agenda.

Regretfully, it’s hard to imagine this as the beginning of a wonderful friendship. It’s enough to listen to the Hizballah spokesmen’s carefully calculated rhetoric to understand that their goal from now on is not to rest on their victory laurels, but to turn their model of armed Jihad into an example to be followed.

Hizballah is not parting with its weapons. On the contrary, it has recently introduced improved anti-air missiles from Teheran - via Damascus of course - as well as heavier 240-mm Katyushas, third-generation anti-tank missiles like the Coronet and so on. Hizballah isn’t interested in the antiquated tanks and slow-rolling artillery left behind by the Israeli-allied South Lebanon Army. It couldn’t move them quickly enough out of the arena, up north to Baalbek.

It is almost certain that Hizballah won’t be in a hurry to set the North ablaze. It took them 17 years of fighting to rid Lebanon of the Israelis (and now, for the first time, they have admitted to a loss on their side of 1,300 men). What they need now is a new strategy. Even if they decide to heat things up on the still-disputed frontier slopes of the Hermon, this would involve a problematic departure from the kind of warfare they are used to. The U.N. has ruled, in Israel’s favor, that the Shebaa farms, which Israel has not left, are not Lebanese territory but Syrian. In any case, the Shebaa territory is part of the Golan Heights, and not Israel proper. The Shebaa farms could serve as a trigger for Hizballah violence, but don’t constitute a target in their own right.

Hizballah’s options lie elsewhere. The first, short-term priority is to "digest" the newly acquired territory, which contains 100,000 Shi’ites, most of whom have spent their whole lives under the administration of Israel’s Lebanon Liaison Unit. Thousands of residents in the new Hizballahstan lost their incomes with the break up of the South Lebanon Army and the sudden severance from Israel. Many villages used to receive water and electricity from us and are in pressing need of an alternative supply. Nasrallah now has to spread his network of educational, medical and religious institutions into the villages of the region. The movement’s military infrastructure rests on these services everywhere else in Lebanon. Hizballah has indicated that it would be happy for some investment from the Beirut authorities or from bodies such as the U.N. Development Project. However, all this is really a case of Hizballah making the right noises to give the impression of bowing its head before the state authority, having declared that it is not assuming what it calls any "security authority" for itself.

But in the long term, Hizballah is bound to be grappling with the question of how to exploit the new situation in order to export the creed of armed struggle to the Palestinians. Intelligence reports already reveal signs of attempts by Hizballah to penetrate the Palestinian arena with the help of Islamic Jihad and some of the Hamas leadership in exile. The plan is to sneak into Israel a number of Palestinians who’ve been recruited, for example, from Turkish universities and sent to Iran for explosives training. Hizballah also intends to launch a massive indoctrination campaign to undermine the position of those who support a rapprochement with Israel.

Nasrallah asserts that in Lebanon, Israel suffered military defeat for the first time, and he promises that this is the beginning of a new era. He preaches in favor of an Intifada "outside of the Oslo framework," as distinct from the short outbursts of violence that occur now and again in the territories.

His words are already having an impact in certain circles. The Palestinian press is very admiring of Hizballah and its methods. And some meetings have been held to discuss the lessons of Lebanon, albeit so far nothing more than that. Arafat has chosen to dismiss Nasrallah’s claim that the withdrawal was a military victory for Hizballah.

Hizballah’s main effort has been supported by Iran and encouraged by Syria. All these will, in my opinion, want to underline the fragility of the situation on the northern border. Stones have already been hurled at the fence, and I would be most surprised if at some point they don’t try to test Israel with a lone sniper here or an explosive charge there. Nasrallah’s approach is undoubtedly to create a state of permanent tension along the border, even if there is no shelling right away. He has already made it clear that he has a weapon of deterrence to wave at Ehud Barak: Safed, Hatzor, Karmiel and the outskirts of Haifa are now within Katyusha range. Hizballah could use this capability not only in response to any massive retaliation launched by Israel, but also to open up a "Second Front" in the event of a renewed outbreak of violence in the territories. Israel, according to Nasrallah, is "weaker than a spider’s web."

The unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, which had to be brought forward and assumed a different format due to the sudden collapse of the SLA, is a dangerous gamble. One can only marvel at the courage of Barak for having taken so much responsibility on his shoulders - against the advice of most of the top echelon of the army and the intelligence branches, contrary to the approach of his more influential ministers (Yossi Sarid among them), and despite the quiet warnings he got from American and Arab officials alike not to speed up the pull-back.

If it transpires that any hope for an agreement with Syria has vanished, the gamble will be even riskier. And all the more so if the Stockholm talks with Arafat’s representatives end in failure.

What’s more, Barak is now obligated to fulfill his promise of a strong Israeli reaction to any attack from Lebanon, just as he kept his word to withdraw by the summer of 2000. The first challenge from across the border must be met with a huge and very painful blow to Lebanon and Syria alike. Not a surgical air strike, but a series of blows that put the Syrians in a state of shock. The prime minister made a mistake by allowing his bureau chief, Danny Yatom, to give the other side advance notice that there is no chance of another Israeli land incursion into Lebanon. As is usual here, people speak too much at the wrong moments. If we so much as hint to Hizballah and the Syrians that Israel is prepared to tolerate chronic disquiet along its northern border, that’s exactly what we’ll get.